Simon Barratt

Latent Communications Server!

Prior to Thanksgiving last week, I attended a 2 day, Microsoft Live Communications Server class.  As luck would have it, only myself and colleague, Rob Smith attended the class, which gave us the ability to modify the content to suit our particular need.

We had a painful start, brought on by the use of Microsoft Virtual PC.  For some reason, once running multiple virtual machines, the ability for the VM's to talk to other VM's on others servers failed, they could hid the hosts, but not the VM's.  Once you close on VM down the other behaved as usual!!

We decided to abort the first day earlier than planned, to allow Online Consulting to re-image all the PC's to run Windows Server 2003, and give up on the virtual idea.  So day one consisted mainly of theory about SIP and how the LCS servers talk to each other.

Day 2 started much better.  The servers were all configured and we were able to download the latest evaluation version of LCS 2005 and Office Communicator 2005.  We even knocked up an Exchange 2003 server, to play with the Outlook/LCS integration features.

We set up two domains with the intent of testing out the federation capabilities of LCS to LCS across domains!  This is what I meant earlier about it being fortunate that only two FMC'ers were in attendance - we got to design the class as we wanted!

We opted to install LCS Standard and Enterprise versions.  In addition to supporting many thousands of more peopled, the Extended version also provides fault tolerance and failover through the use of LCS pools.  Additionally it also requires the use of SQL Server to run.  Based on FMC's user community, I believe we should be able to operate just fine with the Standard edition.  SQL server is only required if you intend to enable the IM archiving capability.

I am glad we are skipping LCS 2003 - It seemed to be a very rough first attempt at the product, with a very rough install routine,  LCS 2005 seems to have improved this significantly.

After modifying DNS with some SIP URI records, we were ready to explore the client options.  We intend to use Office Communicator 2005 as the only IM client in FMC.  Initial impressions were somewhat mixed.  It has a lot of polish to the UI, but I also found its operation to be somewhat different to other IM clients I have used (Sametime, Trillian, Gaim, iChat, Google & AOL).  The way it displays the names of the people in the current chat, take up valuable screen space, and can lead you to confuse it with your buddy list.  The potential to integrate with other technologies (PBX) and AD sounds good, but at what cost?  The license don't look insignificant for the PBX piece.

Next we looked at Outlook, or at least we tried to!  There was no apparent integration option with Live Communicator.  We scratched our collective heads for a few minutes, then decided we did not have the correct version of Outlook 2003 installed!  After unplugging a few cables, tweaking our IP config, we zipped off to the MS download site to get the inevitable service pack for Office.  After applying the service pack, things started looking up!  A quick click and we turned on the Outlook integration options.

These integrate with your calendar and Out of Office status, to update your IM presence appropriately.  This is a really nice feature, one that I have often felt was missing from Sametime.  However, I hope it operates a lot more smoothly in the real world.  For instance, when I set up a meeting on the calendar it took a good 5 minutes after the meeting start time, before my status was updated.  It seemed to take even longer to reset it after the meeting had completed.  I think 15 minutes had passed before my status was updated again.  With this in mind, we renamed it the "Latent Communications Server"

The email integration only went as far as showing the status of names within the email.  It really should show the awareness information in the inbox too - I was surprised when it did not.

After these successes, we moved on to the meaty subject of federation.  The idea being that you can exchange public/private key pairs with another organisation, and have your DMZ based LCS Proxy servers communicate with each other over the Internet, thus you can chat and share presence information with 3rd parties.  This idea is nothing new, but is an important feature for a product to have.  I am not sure what value it will have for FMC, especially as it only link to other LCS systems.  The IM vendors really need to agree on SIP/SIMPLE implementations to make these systems more interoperable, in a standard manner.  Without SMTP email would never of taken off the way it did, the same applied to IM/Presence.  After about an hour and a half, we still had not succeeded in getting it to work, but it was an important exercise to go through, as I now have a good idea of what is involved in implementing it.  It is certainly not something for the faint hearted.  Before, you can even start, you need to have X.509 certificates available, so that will require an additional component/product to implement first.

Overall, after a slow start, we covered a lot of ground in the class.  It certainly helped to have the class to our selves!